I don't think so. China has a huge amount of power over the US economy[1].
What Happens If China Called in Its Debt Holdings
China would not call in its debt all at once. If it did, the demand for the dollar would plummet. This dollar collapse would disrupt international markets even more than the 2008 financial crisis. China's economy would suffer along with everyone else's.
China could crash the American economy any time they want. It'd hurt them, but it'd hurt America a lot more. Especially because oil exporters would immediately switch to doing oil trade in Euros, which would make it exceptionally hard for the dollar to recover.
[1] https://www.thebalance.com/u-s-debt-to-china-how-much-does-i...
But their likely action, according to the article you linked, might actually help the US economy by making its exports more competitive:
> China would not call in its debt all at once. If it did, the demand for the dollar would plummet. This dollar collapse would disrupt international markets even more than the 2008 financial crisis. China's economy would suffer along with everyone else's.
> It's more likely that China would slowly begin selling off its Treasury holdings. Even when it just warns that it plans to do so, dollar demand starts to drop. That hurts China's competitiveness. As it raises its export prices, U.S. consumers would buy American products instead. China could only start this process if it further expands its exports to other Asian countries and increases domestic demand.
China only amassed so much US debt because it sells RMB to buy dollars to keep the RMB down and fuel exports. Reversing that policy would make Chinese exports less competitive on the world market. Ultimately, that could thwart the CCP's ambitions to create "national champions" by limiting them to their domestic market.
How does this affect the US any more than whether they measure oil volume in metric or not? It's not something that changes the real economy, it's just a matter of which ruler you're using. If the oil company has European employees, it still has to pay them in Euros. If the oil company has American employees, it still has to pay them in dollars. Likewise for customers. You have currency coming in, and if it's not what you need, you trade it for what you need.
If you owe the bank a billion dollars, you own the bank.
China would be hurt gravely.
It might affect the price of the next sale of Treasuries, but that's the limit of its impact.
China economy would suffer more.
https://voxeu.org/article/china-s-wto-entry-benefits-us-cons...
https://www.thebalancesmb.com/top-countries-exporting-to-the...
China's #1 customer is the US, by a large margin. Around half of their exports come here. China has far more to lose in a commercial war.
It'd hurt them, but it'd hurt America a lot more.
Nope. The only way they can hurt the US is by economic suicide (dumping all debt). And I mean total annihilation: they'd be shooting themselves. And the USD would suffer, true. But it would recover, US economy has far more autarky.
Meanwhile everything in the US is "made in china" and our entire manufacturing infrastructure and knowledge has deteriorated while China was slowly taking over...
But everyone knows GPU's are the key to economic dominance.
I think people get a distorted picture of that as an artifact of labeling rules. The US exports a lot of industrial equipment, for instance. Most of the economy does not involve the final step of constructing consumer products that leads to the label "made in..." on the shelf of Wal-Mart.
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/07/04/eu-could-agree-a-us-autos-ta...
They estimate 20 and 43 million died, if not caused by, then exacerbated by policies implemented under Mao.
"Since June 2015, all Wikipedias redirect HTTP requests to the corresponding HTTPS addresses, thereby making encryption mandatory for all users. As a result, Chinese censors cannot see which specific pages an individual is viewing, and therefore cannot block a specific subset of pages (such as Ai Weiwei or Tiananmen Square) as they did in past years. As a result, Beijing chose to block the whole Chinese Wikipedia"
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/china-re-educa...
The estimated number of inmates keeps growing by the week. I think it's more accurate to call them re-education camps, but it's an issue that I wish more countries would push China on. I don't get why our (German) government spent so much time on negotiating the Liu Xiaobo issue instead.
Who has granted the Chinese government this right? God? The "consent of the governed"?
> Ignoring the fantastic abuses that the US commits everyday against its minority and poor folks... I think ethically you shouldn't be making judgements about another country when you clearly know so little about it.
Is this... a hard cultural relativist stance?
The question was never if it can, but whether it should.
No you are wrong again. The question was whether its OK to cease all trade with a country solely because of its questionable human rights record. I pointed out that its not. That Sovereign countries have the legal right to do certain things and must be dealt with in an appropriate way.
It is the same argument made, by the way, when the US wants to justify buying oil from the Middle East, none of whose countries have a stellar record regarding human rights.
'China is a sovereign nation and has every right to Govern itself the way it wants to.'
Rather than taking the human rights abuses seriously, you continually obfuscate obvious facts by pointing to the United States' history of human rights abuses (of which there are plenty), and simply double down on your own indefensible position.
You could also do the most elementary research into your own position, which would immediately reveal that currency manipulation, censorship, restrictions on freedom of movement and associated crimes violate UN human rights laws and countless international trade agreements. Any honest definition of 'legal' would account for this.
There's an honest conversation to be had about how sanctions impact the poorest segments of a country. That conversation cant proceed if you don't acknowledge reality.
They tried at least twice, and both kind of succeeded, or at least didn't totally fail. (Both the ROC and PRC are republics. The PRC especially obviously isn't a western-style liberal-democratic republic, but it is a republic.)
Exactly like North Korea does, but that's not a valid reason to approve whatever they do.
Pretty generous considering the US actually separated thousands of kids from their parents at the border, some of whose parents have still not been found. If you didn't factor that into your moral compass, you probably should.
Any system has injustices; we cannot prevent that. But willfully enacting forcible family separation was not an accident.
Hundreds of orphans is bad enough.
Hundreds of thousands is a thousand times worse. So, yeah. Not equivalent.
China is not allowed to do what it wants to its citizens, that is the load of crap.
Read the wikipedia article and then tell me how ignorant I am: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_China
Or this one if you need more: https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-34592336
As opposed to "enhanced interrogation techniques"?
One thing the West certainly does better than the East is marketing.
Why might a government torturing its own citizens be morally equivalent to a government torturing the citizens of other countries?
It intuitively feels, to me, "more bad" for a country to torture its own citizens than for a country to torture citizens of its enemies (although both are still bad). Thus, I'd want to hear a justification that "actually, no, both are the same degree of bad."
I don't necessarily agree that the onus is on me (you were the one to initially bring it up here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17717319 and I also gave my justification, which is that it feels intuitively different), but I can throw out some ideas as to why. I said it was interesting for a reason...
1) Perhaps it's a moral foundations (Haidt) difference: a state torturing its own citizens violates a moral "loyalty" principle as well as a moral "care" (harm avoidance) principle. Thus, it feels worse IF you ascribe to loyalty as a valid moral foundation. Haidt suggests modern liberals heavily elevate the "care" and "fairness" principles over the others, suggesting we might have a deep value difference causing our different opinions.
2) A more political perspective: the US constitution contains certain rights which all citizens are granted (note that US citizenship is defined as a "right to have rights"). See the passage (emphasis mine): "we hold these truths to be self-evident... that [all men] are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness".
One could argue that for the US government to torture its citizens would be additionally unjust, on the grounds that it violates these constitutional rights, specifically (I'd argue) that of Liberty. It's a violation of a social contract as well as a violation of an ethical principle, making it a worse injustice. Note that the authority here is granted to "[the] Creator", intensifying the ethical severity of violating this social contract.
3) Could also make some lower-Kohlberg-level arguments about this, but they're less fun and interesting.
I disagree, I think it is very easy to justify that breaking my arm is "more good", in that it is preferable. If one is -100 and the other is -50, then it is "more good" (i.e. the difference is positive). By "more good" I don't mean that it is good, mind you, just that it is better/preferable.
> Haidt suggests modern liberals heavily elevate the "care" and "fairness" principles over the others
I think this is our difference. I wouldn't want my country torturing anyone, enemy or not. Your second argument conflates legality with morality, so I don't really consider it especially valid. Unless you mean that the government has made a promise to the citizens to not torture them, and it would be additionally breaking that promise. Still, though, I consider the "torturing people" part much, much worse than the "you broke the promise" part, so much so that the latter seems like a rounding error to me, to use a somewhat utilitarian phrase.
Neither are preferable over "don't break any of my limbs", but I understand your point. I only nitpick because "having no bad things" is not equivalent to "having good things," in my mind. This is something I dealt with on a personal level relatively recently.
> Your second argument conflates legality with morality, so I don't really consider it especially valid.
The constitution speaks in terms of "god-given rights" and not "laws". The founding fathers were speaking the language of moral imperatives and not of legal imperatives. This is intentional.
The conflation occurs when people consider the laws themselves as opposed to their motivating intentions to be moral imperatives. But my claim is that "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" are (some of) the motivating moral intentions that justify the laws, thus there is no conflation in my argument.
> I consider the "torturing people" part much, much worse than the "you broke the promise" part, so much so that the latter seems like a rounding error to me, to use a somewhat utilitarian phrase.
Ironically, I argue a utilitarian would disagree: it is likely that a government breaking their promises is harmful and perhaps terrifying to a much larger group of individuals than those who are directly harmed via torture. I figure there's a strong utilitarian argument that (a small harm * 150 million people) > (a large harm * 200 people), but then again, this is part of the horror embodied by stories like "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas".
I am no utilitarian myself, but I am also no orthodox Humanist either...
I agree with you. The citizen scenario includes extra immoral elements like in-group betrayal and abuse of friends in addition to whatever immoral elements come from the torture itself. The enemy scenario feels like the immoral elements may even be a bit muted by that fact that you're probably already willing to kill the enemy, which feels like a more extreme action.
Tell me, would you rather be tortured in Gitmo for a decade and live with the scars for the rest of your life or just take a bullet to your head and be done with it?
Torture is immoral, full stop. No human being should ever be tortured.
At the moment, so is the US. There is some measure of hope in some corners that this is an aberration that will be brief at least at the federal level, and that the reversal of it at the federal level will eventually negate any adverse trends at other levels, but that's hope, not established fact.
I didn't say that the US did anything comparable to that, I said that the argument that the big-picture difference between the two was that China was institutionalizing systemic racism while the US was addressing it was, whatever the past or hoped-for future of the US might be, currently inaccurate on the US side.
> I'm reading so many people defending China, I have to think it's because they haven't done any research, and assume China's not that bad.
Maybe somewhere, but the post you are responding to said not one word about China (other than a quote for context from the post it was responding to), either in defense or otherwise.
The article is about tariffs on China, this is thread is all about China, you responded to a post about human rights violations in China.
I'm not saying the US is perfect, but compared to China right now the US is .
Redlining, racial-profiling, school-prison pipeline, pay discrimination, voter id laws that discriminate against minorities... I can go on and on.
> I'm not saying the US is perfect, but compared to China right now the US is
No its not. They are not comparable and shouldn't be. You think the US is great because I'm assuming you belong to socio-economic classes that have granted you a great quality of life and freedoms which are theoretically promised to all US citizens. But in practise, they are not and the situation is much more nuanced.
> No its not. They are not comparable and shouldn't be.
Why can you not compare two countries' human rights?
> But in practise, they are not and the situation is much more nuanced.
It is more nuanced as you suggest, the difference is that the government of China is busy locking up muslims, and the US is busy passing anti discrimination laws.
It doesn't matter and I frankly don't care what you want. Slavery was technically illegal after the Civil War and yet you still had Jim Crow; similarly racism is technically illegal but there continues to be systemic racism in the US, whether or not promoted by Government policy. To the millions of African-Americans incarcerated for possession of Marijuana, it doesn't matter whether there are protections for minorities, because the laws are not enforced. The War on Drugs was a euphemism for a war on minority communities.
> It is more nuanced as you suggest, the difference is that the government of China is busy locking up muslims, and the US is busy passing anti discrimination laws.
No, its not that simple either. The US is busy locking up immigrants... what do you say to that? Or about locking up minorities for minor infractions, while whites go scot-free? What about that?
Its not simple, which is why it must not be compared. You are allowed to criticize China for its human rights record, but they are equally free to criticize you for yours. What is not OK is to spread the lie that the US is some sort of utopia of human rights when its clearly not, and has not been ever since its inception.
I suppose you could say there are more minorities in jail, but minorities tend to be more on the poverty line which is an easy explanation, I would be interested in a study on the treatment of only those in poverty.
Illegal immigrants should be deported, legal immigrants should not be.
The US is not a utopia, but my point was china is looking more and more like Big Brother in 1984.
Is this how you justify concentration camps?
What I'm arguing against is penalizing the whole country with a trade embargo. That is just bullshit coming from someone who understands very little about how international relations work.
I'm glad that weapon sales to all of China are banned, not just to imperialistic individuals within the PLA.
Sanction enough individuals and you force them to fall in line and discourage that kind of corruption.
Yeah, or "the US government respected Germany’s right to govern its own citizens" as it says here: https://exhibitions.ushmm.org/americans-and-the-holocaust/ma...
> They may not have the same system and freedom that the West is used to, but authoritarianism has been the norm in China for centuries.
Antisemitism had been pretty "normal" for 2 millenia in Europe. Would you go to a holocaust museum and roll your eyes at them, too? Mayne tell them the death camps in annexed territories were bad, but that all the stuff from 1933 to 1939 should be removed, because it was just internal politics and making a judgement about that just shows how little one knows.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stolperstein
Can you even imagine how many of those were put up in response to mere internal politics? You should clear up how none of that was bad, would save a lot of money on maintaining exhibits, and archiving survivor testomies and all that.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/china-s-xinjiang-p...
> More than half the people we met along the way during our journey spoke of family members or acquaintances who were "sent to school." One driver in Hotan talked about his 72-year-old grandfather. A person in Urumqi told the story of his daughter's professor. An airplane passenger spoke of his best friend.
I guess they forgot to mention that authoritarianism has been the norm in China for centuries, so being tortured or a loved one being disappeared and killed doesn't really bother them. They have a "different system and freedom", after all. As does anyone who moves there, anyone the secret police gets their paws on, even internationally. When they get locked up and murdered, they don't really feel it the same way you or I do. When they have families and friendships, it's not like they're actually sad when that ends. They don't suppress showing pain they feel, they simply don't feel it in the first place.
It's all good, nothing to see here. Just the normal day to day business of being a monster.
On the other hand we Trumps incredible negotiating skills. Same ones he used to bring Kim Jong Un to heel and denuclearize North Korea.
In my estimation they seem a hell of a lot smarter than most other countries as well, I don't think they need or deserve help from third parties any longer.
Manufacturing goods is the root of an economy. China is the root, the US is a leaf.
Not any longer.
Once upon a time, agriculture was the root of an economy, but these things change. Manufacturing became the root. But it's not any more - now technology is.
You can literally be taught how to design a car in CAD. It can be done on your computer with a mouse. But to fabricate a car takes a life time of knowledge from multitudes of disciplines.
The proof is in the pudding. China is well known for replicating and ripping off patented designs in seconds because design is trivial once you know how to fabricate something.
The only reason why China can't produce an nvidia GPU is because they don't have the knowledge to fabricate it.
Granted, I don't have the stat for the entire world, so it might be bigger. Considering the US and EU are half of global GDP, I doubt it.
1) https://2016.trade.gov/publications/ita-newsletter/1010/serv...
Let's put your statement to the test then
Can China put tariffs on iPhones, Windows operating systems, Apple computers, Intel/AMD cpus, Nvidia GPUs?
1) Given the current balance of trade between the US and China, each $1 of retaliatory Chinese tariffs has a larger impact as a percentage of trade flow than each $1 of US tariffs.
2) The Chinese economy is much more nimble and diverse than the US, and – especially with government intervention – may have an easier time developing domestic alternatives to US goods.
On an unrelated note, it's interesting that they're implementing a tariff on recyclables. That could be a devastating blow to the already struggling US recycling market.
That doesn't benefit China. What you are saying is that China has less total trade that they can tariff than the US.
>2) The Chinese economy is much more nimble and diverse than the US, and – especially with government intervention – may have an easier time developing domestic alternatives to US goods.
Source? It's common knowledge that the US has the most largest and most diverse economy in the world.
I will concede (2) was not well expressed. I just find it much much easier to imagine – due to differences in labor forces, natural resources, environmental regulations, etc. – a suddenly growing Chinese motorcycle industry than, say, a resurgent US steel industry.
In the short term, the US could potentially get some concessions that it wants. However, things have already gotten further than most predicted, lots of people expected China to give Trump a few crumbs that didn't really matter but allow him to declare victory. Trump seems to not want that, so it might be too late to avoid damage.
Capital is not going to pass this growth up.
Given we're talking about the CCP, I suppose they could right their reverse pyramid using the same brutal means they used to create it. Say, by heavily pushing euthanasia options onto retired folks who can't care for themselves, with financial sanctions for their families if they refuse to comply.
edit: source for those who don't believe me: https://www.kaieteurnewsonline.com/2013/01/17/population-gro...
You may think that the west has a collective interest, but does Trump think so when he gets mad every time he sees a Mercedes car running down Fifth avenue?
http://fortune.com/2018/05/31/trump-mercedes-benz-german-car...
Also Canada is balking at how the US is abandoning NAFTA just so that it could use its larger size in trade negotiations.
The WTO is ineffective and broken. Based on prior precedent, if the US raised objections to the "China 2025" policy, the adjudication of the dispute will probably be finish sometime around 2030. In the past, the Chinese government has typically ignored adverse WTO rulings or dragged its feet until they were moot. IIRC, after all off that, only then will the WTO sanction tariffs. It's basically the definition of too little, too late.